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Regions of Texas map

Sheet TX-03 · 4 natural regions · 16 cultural regions

"Regions of Texas" means two different things. Schools teach the four natural regions defined by landform. Texans themselves use a looser set of named regions such as West Texas, the Hill Country and the Valley. Both are on this page.

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Gold markers mark the center of each cultural region; click one for its own map page.

Two different answers

If the question comes out of a Texas geography class, the answer is four: the Gulf Coastal Plains, the Interior Lowlands, the Great Plains and the Basin and Range. These are physiographic regions, drawn from landform, rock and elevation. Their edges are things you can stand on — the Balcones Escarpment, the Caprock — rather than county lines, and each of the four keeps going past the state border into the rest of North America. The 4 regions of Texas map takes them one at a time.

If the question comes from a Texan, the answer is a name: West Texas, the Hill Country, the Panhandle, the Valley. Those are cultural regions, and they come from settlement, crops, speech and which schools play each other. Nobody agrees exactly where they stop, so the counties in between belong to two at once: Tom Green is called both West Texas and the Concho Valley, and the northern Hill Country counties answer to Central Texas as well. The two systems overlap rather than compete — the Basin and Range region and Big Bend describe nearly the same ground under different names.

The 4 natural regions of Texas

RegionWhereLandscapeMajor cities
Gulf Coastal PlainsEast and south, from the Louisiana line to the Rio Grande, inland to the Balcones EscarpmentFlat to rolling, under 1,000 ft; Piney Woods, Post Oak Belt, Blackland Prairie, coastal marsh, South Texas brushHouston, San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Corpus Christi
Interior Lowlands (North Central Plains)North-central Texas, west of the Coastal Plains to the CaprockRolling prairie and Cross Timbers woodlands, 750–2,500 ftFort Worth, Abilene, Wichita Falls
Great PlainsPanhandle, South Plains, Edwards Plateau and Llano BasinHigh, flat Llano Estacado above the Caprock; limestone Hill Country to the southLubbock, Amarillo, Midland, San Angelo
Basin and Range (Mountains and Basins)Trans-Pecos, west of the Pecos RiverDesert mountains and basins; Guadalupe Peak (8,751 ft), Davis and Chisos mountains, Big BendEl Paso, Alpine, Marfa

The dividing line between the Coastal Plains and the higher regions is the Balcones Escarpment, a fault zone that runs through San Antonio, Austin and Waco. It is why those cities sit on the edge of the Hill Country and why springs such as Barton Springs and the San Marcos River emerge there. The 4 regions map covers each region in more depth.

Cultural regions of Texas

These are the regions people actually name when they say where they're from. Boundaries are fuzzy and overlap; each region page explains where it is generally agreed to start and end.

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